Seeing and feeling the body

Recognizing one’s body as separate from the external world plays a crucial role in detecting external events, and thus in planning adequate reactions to them. In addition, recognizing one’s body as distinct from others’ bodies allows remapping the experiences of others onto one’s sensory system, providing improved social understanding. In line with these assumptions, two well-known multisensory mechanisms demonstrated modulations of somatosensation when viewing both one’s own and someone else’s body: the Visual Enhancement of Touch (VET) and the Visual Remapping of Touch (VRT) effects. Vision of the body, in the former, and vision of the body being touched, in the latter, enhance tactile processing. The present dissertation investigated the multisensory nature of these mechanisms and their neural bases. Further experiments compared these effects for viewing one’s own body or viewing another person’s body. These experiments showed important differences in multisensory processing for one’s own body, and for other bodies, and also highlighted interactions between VET and VRT effects. The present experimental evidence demonstrated that a multisensory representation of one’s body – underlie by a high order fronto-parietal network - sends rapid modulatory feedback to primary somatosensory cortex, thus functionally enhancing tactile processing. These effects were highly spatially-specific, and depended on current body position. In contrast, vision of another person’s body can drive mental representations able to modulate tactile perception without any spatial constraint. Finally, these modulatory effects seem sometimes to interact with high order information, such as emotional content of a face. This allows one’s somatosensory system to adequately modulate perception of external events on the body surface, as a function of its interaction with the emotional state expressed by another individual.

Integration of cognitive and affective processes in perception and decision-making

The relationship between emotion and cognition is a topic that raises great interest in research. Recently, a view of these two processes as interactive and mutually influencing each other has become predominant. This dissertation investigates the reciprocal influences of emotion and cognition, both at behavioral and neural level, in two specific fields, such as attention and decision-making. Experimental evidence on how emotional responses may affect perceptual and attentional processes has been reported. In addition, the impact of three factors, such as personality traits, motivational needs and social context, in modulating the influence that emotion exerts on perception and attention has been investigated. Moreover, the influence of cognition on emotional responses in decision-making has been demonstrated. The current experimental evidence showed that cognitive brain regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are causally implicated in regulation of emotional responses and that this has an effect at both pre and post decisional stages. There are two main conclusions of this dissertation: firstly, emotion exerts a strong influence on perceptual and attentional processes but, at the same time, this influence may also be modulated by other factors internal and external to the individuals. Secondly, cognitive processes may modulate emotional prepotent responses, by serving a regulative function critical to driving and shaping human behavior in line with current goals.

Fresh Produce Safety and Good Agricultural Practices: Stakeholders' Perception and Consumers' Choice in Thailand

Concerns of Thai consumers on food safety have been recently increasing, especially in urban areas and for fresh produce because food safety scandals, such as chemical residues on fresh produce (e.g., cabbage) still frequently occur. The Thai government tried to meet consumer needs by imposing in the domestic market a stronger regulation aimed at increasing the baseline level of food safety assurance and by introducing a voluntary standard (based on Good Agricultural Practices or GAPs and known as Q-GAP) and the related food safety label (i.e., Q mark). However, since standards and regulations are weakly implemented in the domestic market compared to exported products, there is still a lack of Thai consumers’ confidence in the safety of local food products. In this work the current situation of GAPs adoption in Thai fresh produce production is analysed. Furthermore, it is studied whether Thai consumers place value on food safety labels available on the market, to know whether consumer demand could drive the market of certified safer products. This study contains three essays: 1) a review of the literature, 2) a qualitative study on stakeholders' perception toward GAPs adoption and 3) a quantitative study, aimed at analysing consumers' preferences and willingness-to-pay for food safety labels on fresh produce using a discrete choice experiment. This dissertation contributes to the economics of quality assurance and labelling, specifically addressing GAPs and food safety label in the fresh produce supply chain. Results show that Q-GAP could be effectively used to improve food safety in Thai domestic market, but its credibility should be improved. Stakeholder’s awareness toward food safety issues and the delivery of reliable and sound information are crucial. Thai consumers are willing to pay a premium price for food safety labelled produce over unlabelled ones. Implications for both government and business decision-makers are discussed.

The Perception of American Adolescent Culture Through the Dubbing and Fansubbing of a Selection of US Teen Series from 1990 to 2013

The present dissertation aims at analyzing the construction of American adolescent culture through teen-targeted television series and the shift in perception that occurs as a consequence of the translation process. In light of the recent changes in television production and consumption modes, largely caused by new technologies, this project explores the evolution of Italian audiences, focusing on fansubbing (freely distributed amateur subtitles made by fans for fan consumption) and social viewing (the re-aggregation of television consumption based on social networks and dedicated platforms, rather than on physical presence). These phenomena are symptoms of a sort of ‘viewership 2.0’ and of a new type of active viewing, which calls for a revision of traditional AVT strategies. Using a framework that combines television studies, new media studies, and fandom studies with an approach to AVT based on Descriptive Translation Studies (Toury 1995), this dissertation analyzes the non-Anglophone audience’s growing need to participation in the global dialogue and appropriation process based on US scheduling and informed by the new paradigm of convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and affective economics (Jenkins 2006 and 2007), as well as the constraints intrinsic to multimodal translation and the different types of linguistic and cultural adaptation performed through dubbing (which tends to be more domesticating; Venuti 1995) and fansubbing (typically more foreignizing). The study analyzes a selection of episodes from six of the most popular teen television series between 1990 and 2013, which has been divided into three ages based on the different modes of television consumption: top-down, pre-Internet consumption (Beverly Hills, 90210, 1990 – 2000), emergence of audience participation (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997 – 2003; Dawson’s Creek, 1998 – 2003), age of convergence and Viewership 2.0 (Gossip Girl, 2007 – 2012; Glee, 2009 – present; The Big Bang Theory, 2007 - present).

Visual-somatosensory interactions in mental representations of the body and the face

The body is represented in the brain at levels that incorporate multisensory information. This thesis focused on interactions between vision and cutaneous sensations (i.e., touch and pain). Experiment 1 revealed that there are partially dissociable pathways for visual enhancement of touch (VET) depending upon whether one sees one’s own body or the body of another person. This indicates that VET, a seeming low-level effect on spatial tactile acuity, is actually sensitive to body identity. Experiments 2-4 explored the effect of viewing one’s own body on pain perception. They demonstrated that viewing the body biases pain intensity judgments irrespective of actual stimulus intensity, and, more importantly, reduces the discriminative capacities of the nociceptive pathway encoding noxious stimulus intensity. The latter effect only occurs if the pain-inducing event itself is not visible, suggesting that viewing the body alone and viewing a stimulus event on the body have distinct effects on cutaneous sensations. Experiment 5 replicated an enhancement of visual remapping of touch (VRT) when viewing fearful human faces being touched, and further demonstrated that VRT does not occur for observed touch on non-human faces, even fearful ones. This suggests that the facial expressions of non-human animals may not be simulated within the somatosensory system of the human observer in the same way that the facial expressions of other humans are. Finally, Experiment 6 examined the enfacement illusion, in which synchronous visuo-tactile inputs cause another’s face to be assimilated into the mental self-face representation. The strength of enfacement was not affected by the other’s facial expression, supporting an asymmetric relationship between processing of facial identity and facial expressions. Together, these studies indicate that multisensory representations of the body in the brain link low-level perceptual processes with the perception of emotional cues and body/face identity, and interact in complex ways depending upon contextual factors.

Consumer Perception and Willingness to Pay for Local Food

A growing number of empirical studies recently investigated consumers' valuation for local food products. However, different aspects related to the local food consumption still remain vague or unexplored. As such, the objective of the present research is to fulfill the existing literature using a mixed methodological approach for the investigation of consumers' preferences and Willingness to Pay (WTP) for local food products. First of all, local food is still a blurred concept and this factor might be source of individuals' misperception for the local origin meaning. Therefore, a qualitative research has been performed in order to investigate the meaning and the perception of the local food in the Italian food market. Results from this analysis have been used as inputs for the building of a non-hypothetical Real Choice Experiment (RCE) to estimate consumers' WTP for locally and organically produced apple sauce. The contribution of this study is three-fold: (1) consumers' valuation for the local origin is interpreted in terms of regional borders, over the organic food claim in case of an unusual food product in the area of interest, (2) the interaction between individuals' personality traits and consumers’ preferences for local and organic foods is analyzed, (3) the role of Commitment Cost creation in consumers' choice making in case of uncertainty due to the use of a novel food product and of an unconventional food claim is investigated. Results suggest that consumers are willing to pay a higher price premium for organic over locally produced apple sauce, possibly because of the presence of a regulated certification. In accordance with Commitment Cost theory, the organic label might thus decrease consumers' uncertainty for the features of the product in question. Results also indicate that individuals' personality can be source of heterogeneity in consumers' preferences.